Chapter 20


What happened next was something that none of them were really prepared for.

The lights went out.

Only, it wasn't just the lights – the room was pitch black. Blacker than pitch black. It was as though someone had turned out the sun, or perhaps turned off their eyes. Tony got a brief sense of what Jarvis must have felt when his visuals went.

He swung his head from side to side in panic, hoping to catch some source of light, but there was nothing.

Hello?

His own voice sounded very small and alone. It didn't echo back to him off anything. He was overwhelmed by the sudden feeling of being surrounded by nothing on any side, suddenly aware that he couldn't feel any ground beneath him either. His stomach lurched at the thought and he curled in on himself, so very small in such endless nothingness. Even worse than that was the crushing feeling of hopelessness, the feeling that no one was going to come for him, that no one would want to even if they could. He was going to die here, nowhere, all alone. So very alone…

Bruce was past the point of no return and he knew it. That was why he was surprised to find himself still un-transformed a few moments later when a strange silence had come over him. He kept his eyes closed and waited. That was when he realised that it was more than just silence that had come over him. He was alone.

It was… unbelievable.

All his life he had been fighting, struggling, holding back that other guy. Always trying to be a person, not just the monster inside. Now he was here –somewhere – and he was just him. It was freedom, it was peace, and it was… really unfair.

Why did he get to finally be himself when there was no one here to witness Bruce as just Bruce? He finally got the chance to prove that he was an individual, a human being in his own right, and he was denied the audience to share it with? Why was it always like this? Life was forever playing jokes on him, messing with him, turning him round and round and inside out and he was just expected to put up with it? It made feel so… so… oh.

He finally opened his eyes and saw the green flames licking back the darkness around him. He couldn't keep the tears from running down his face as he realised that he had always been alone.

There had never been any monster.

The emptiness about him, while intimidating at first, was actually rather beautiful to Coulson. He took a moment to breathe deeply and consider how he felt about this. Sure, he could die out here, but he could die any day in his line of work and he had long since gotten used to that fact. Death – while a mystery – was inevitable, and not something a SHIELD agent had time to worry about.

No, this was one of the reasons he had joined SHIELD in the first place. Life had been so boring, growing up. Everyone had gone to school, everyone had graduated and gotten a job, everyone had gotten married and had kids. He had never wanted that – any of that. He'd read and read the comics, the stories, and he'd dreamed of the super heroes. Dreamed and dreamed his life away until his teachers yelled and his parents despaired. He wanted, needed more in his life. His enthusiasm had eventually attracted attention and gotten him a small job in SHIELD. He had focussed his daydreams and worked his way up the ranks, and then they had happened – the Avengers. His dreams were so close. He had just wanted to be one of them, but he supposed, working with them – even at a distance – was the next best thing. He had done well in his life – he had succeeded in his own eyes and that was enough. He lived most days on the edge, doing things that ordinary people couldn't imagine. That was what he had been born to do.

So he sat and watched the emptiness about him, marvelled in its completeness and felt himself to be at peace.

He only felt a small flicker of disappointment when the darkness retreated and he blinked back into the kitchen of Stark Tower.